


Ten Gold Florins

by equestrianstatue



Category: A Knight's Tale (2001)
Genre: Erotic Massage (Sort Of), M/M, Missing Scene, Prostitution (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-12 01:59:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18001655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: “This— ” Will waves his hand, abruptly, in Chaucer’s general direction— “is not how I wish to be reimbursed.”“Really?”“Why on earth would you think that it was?”“Why on earth would you think that I have any other way of paying?”





	Ten Gold Florins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [omnishambles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/omnishambles/gifts), [ailcia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ailcia/gifts).



“Thank you,” Chaucer is saying, over and over again, as they leave the summoner and the pardoner behind them. He stumbles over the foot of his trousers as he pulls them on, hopping on one leg. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“All right,” says Will.

“You won’t regret this, I swear it.”

Will would like to believe him. His head tells him that this may have been a very foolish decision that has most certainly set him up for the same fall again and again. His heart tells him that it was probably the right thing to do.

“If he does have cause to regret it,” says Wat, from behind both of them, “I’ll smack you so hard in the mouth you’ll be able to taste your own insides.”

“Thank you, Wat. I’ll remember that.”

Wat spits desultorily into the dirt on the ground.

“Here,” Roland is saying, pressing Will’s helmet into his hands, “and for Christ’s sake, get a move on— ”

They’ll be lucky to make it to the sword-ring in time to avoid a forfeit. Will doubles his pace, and Chaucer falls into step beside him, clutching his grubby bundle of clothes to his chest.

“I mean it,” Chaucer says, “You won’t ever have to do that again. I promise.”

“Let’s hope not.” Will puts on his helmet, his world suddenly shuttered within the thick metal, and tugs at the loose plate at his shoulder. It will have to do. When he looks up, Chaucer is fidgeting with the arms of his shirt, trying to pull it back on. “And anyhow, don’t go thinking this is a gift. You’ll pay me back.”

Chaucer pauses, and studies Will’s face through his visor. His mouth twitches. “Very well,” he says, after a moment, and then his head disappears into the cloth of his shirt.

*

As the sun sinks below the horizon, the wild exhilaration of the day sinks gradually into exhaustion. Will’s body is stiff and sore. His victories came at the price of more blows than he has ever taken in a single day, and now that the shock of success is wearing off, he seems to be able to feel every one.

He longs for hot water to wash in, as Sir Ector used sometimes to call for after a hard bout, but their kettle was lost on the road to Rouen and Will is too tired to go out again and find another one. Even if Roland or Wat were here, he is not sure he would be able to bring himself to ask one of them to do it for him. But he is alone, anyhow, having left the others at the tavern, still flush with triumph. He could have stayed. There is much of the night to go. But after all, he has to fight again tomorrow.

Slowly, Will undresses to his shirt. Alone, there is space to stretch out fully, and he lies back on the pile of furs that cover the floor of their tent, feeling his joints crack.

He tries to think of what else had brought Sir Ector comfort when he had exerted himself. Will would boil him hot water, and Roland knew how to tend to any open wounds. But if Sir Ector was not bloodied but only bruised, he would have one of them massage carefully at the stiff joints of his shoulders and knees to loosen them again. Staring at the canvas above him, Will reaches up to his own shoulder, and rolls it gently in its socket.

There is movement at the flap of the tent. As Will looks up, Chaucer’s head appears in the gap. “Hello,” he says. “How does my liege?”

“Oh,” says Will, waving his other hand. “Well enough.”

“Yes, you look it.”

“I thought you’d all be out all night.”

Chaucer shrugs. “The others may be. Although Wat is surprisingly bad at holding his drink. If he doesn’t come back tonight, I’d wager it’s because he’s asleep on the floor of a cook-shop rather than out carousing.”

With the remaining shreds of his tired wit, Will says, “I wouldn’t bet on it if I were you.”

Chaucer’s lips curve into something that is almost a smile. “Ah.”

Will sits up. This seems to catch his body by surprise, and he lets out a little breath of discomfort as it protests at the sudden movement.

Chaucer says, “You’re hurt.”

“Not _hurt_ ,” says Will, only a little defensively. “Just— ”

“Strained.”

“Yes.” Will rolls the joint of his shoulder again, trying not to wince too visibly.

Chaucer is watching him with his arms folded. “I could do that,” he says, after a moment. “If you’d like.”

Will supposes there is no shame in it. If Sir Ector had thought it well to have others ease his pain, then it must be knightly. “Could you?”

Chaucer nods, unfolds his arms, and comes to kneel down just behind him. Without warning, he digs his fingers into the muscle just by Will’s shoulder blade, through the thin cloth of his shirt.

“Ow!” says Will, before he can stop himself, but then the pain subsides and relief outstrips it as Chaucer kneads his fingers carefully. “Sorry. That’s actually very good. Thank you.”

Chaucer makes a sound that might be indignation or might be amusement, and carries on. He moves his hands upwards so that his thumbs make precise, firm circles just at the base of Will’s neck. After a moment, Will hangs his head forward, weary and comfortable, and makes a small, appreciative grunt. He very much doubts that his own efforts, delivered with far less skill, were anywhere near as effective, but it is good to know that he might have been some small comfort to Sir Ector.

He wonders if Chaucer has squired before. He had assumed not. He does not even seem to have heralded before, if that is indeed what he thinks he’s doing out there. But then, perhaps it is Will who has an outdated notion of how things are done. He has not been in England for so very long. Perhaps they are all like Chaucer there, these days.

“How do you come up with it all?” he asks, his voice rather slow and tired. Chaucer has moved his hands a little lower, over the muscles that sit on either side of his spine.

“Hmm?”

“What you tell people. Where you say I’ve been. What you say I’ve done.”

“I don’t know,” Chaucer says, after a moment. “I suppose one starts with the truth, and then… works outward.”

“But you don’t know where I really have been.”

“No. But you don’t exactly hide your heart. It’s easy enough to start from that.”

The world around them feels very dark and quiet. The sounds of shouting and laughter in the air outside are far away enough to be almost dreamlike. Chaucer has stopped what he is doing, and has moved around a little, so that he is at Will’s side. He places a hand on Will’s thigh, where it aches, and then he pauses.

“Would you like me to go on?” he says.

Will barely looks up. “By God, yes, please.”

Chaucer rubs gently, rather slowly, at the flesh of his leg. Then, slightly to Will’s surprise, he begins to move his hand up and under Will’s shirt.

“Wait,” says Will, shaking himself out of his torpor and raising his head.

Chaucer pauses. “I thought— are we not— ”

“What are you doing?”

“Paying you back?”

“In what way?”

“Oh, well.” Chaucer’s tongue flicks out to wet his lips. “Hands or mouth, whichever you like. Thanks to Master Wat’s interrupted assault this afternoon, I am variously bodily sore, so I would prefer not to be taken, but if you must…”

“Hold on. Stop.” Will shuffles backwards, his own stiff limbs suddenly far from his mind. “That is not at all what I meant.”

Chaucer looks genuinely surprised. “What?”

“This— ” Will waves his hand, abruptly, in Chaucer’s general direction— “is not how I wish to be reimbursed.”

“Really?”

“Why on earth would you think that it was?”

“Why on earth would you think that I have any other way of paying?” Chaucer sighs, pushes one hand through the dirty blonde scrub of his hair, and then his bright, pale eyes turn up to Will’s face again. “Come on. Look, I’m good, I promise. I may not be any kind of warrior, but I know my trade. It takes very little to bring forth a torrent of words, you know, fast and beautiful— all from a penstroke, or simply my tongue.”

“Well,” says Will, swallowing, “I don’t require you to do so. Thanks.”

Chaucer sighs, sits back on his haunches, and stares at him rather inscrutably. “Then why did you leave so early?”

“I was tired, like I said. I have to fight again tomorrow.”

“And why did you keep looking back at me as you left?”

“I did not.”

“You did,” says Chaucer, sounding faintly annoyed. “I wondered rather at your audacity. I was quite impressed by it.”

“There was no such thing,” says Will, hotly. It was not an hour ago that he had left the tavern, threading his way through the tables towards the door. He had looked back at their table before he reached the street, certainly. Wat’s voice was raised in song, and Will had wondered how the rest of the room was liking it. Roland was laughing, and Chaucer, leaning back in his chair, was smiling a thin, strange, indulgent kind of a smile at them both.

“All right, here’s how I see it,” Chaucer says. “Let’s take as a starting point the incontrovertible truth that I am never going to be in possession of ten gold florins, and it is to such an amount that I am in your debt. So, where do we go from here? Option one, the debt is written off. Possible, but unreasonable. You are heavily out of pocket, and it is unquestionably my fault. So, option two, you indenture me in your service until I have worked the amount off. But I think you would find me a terribly lazy, insolent and unsatisfactory squire, and bear in mind that this is even in comparison to Wat. I cannot in good conscience recommend this course of action. So we are left with option three, which is that you allow me to apply my actual skills to the matter at hand. If you _prefer_ ,” he says, raising his eyes upwards, “I could write you an ode, or seven, but I honestly think you’d be far more satisfied by having me suck your cock.”

Will finds, unhelpfully, that the skin of his face is heating. He bites at his tongue. “Today,” he says, eventually, “I met the woman I love.”

“Oh, please,” says Chaucer, not unkindly. “You don’t yet know her name. I don’t think you can consider yourself betrothed.”

“I would not dishonour her, even in thought.”

“Wouldn’t you? It’ll have to be in person, then.”

“Don’t say that.”

“All right,” Chaucer says. “I’m sorry.” He purses his lips, his expression not entirely unlike the one he had worn earlier that evening in the tavern, when Will had so wondered what he could be thinking. Then he says, “I could just talk, if you prefer, and you could— ” He makes a fluid, obscene gesture. “If you wanted.”

Will’s mind is whirling. It had begun to settle, under the weight of his long day, of the aches and pains that came with it, of the bright, tender possibility of his new love— and under Chaucer’s hands, not so very long ago. But now he is— unhorsed. His reason splintered. His senses seem to have sharpened. He thinks that he can hear the very breath coming from them both, that he can smell something in the air that seems to come from Chaucer’s skin.

Chaucer says, “Have you, before?”

Will feels the muscles in his legs tighten, just a little. “Not— no.”

“But with a woman.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, it’s very much the same. Listen— let me show you, and if it’s not to your taste, then say so, and I’ll accept that we’ll have find another way to settle things.”

It is Chaucer’s face, the heavy seriousness of his expression concealing a barely-discernible hint of mockery, that does for him, or so Will thinks. But whatever it is, Will says, quietly, “All right.”

At this Chaucer’s lips twitch again. Will draws in a breath as Chaucer moves nearer to him on the furs, although he had never retreated all that far in the first place. Will feels hot and restive. The whole thing has riled him, unbalanced him, with Chaucer so very close by as such ideas and images came so fully-formed from his mouth, and—

“Oh, you lie,” says Chaucer, sounding delighted with himself, as he finds Will’s hard prick beneath his shirt. “You have lied all along.”

“I have not,” Will says, or rather gasps.

“You may tell the truth, then, Sir Ulrich, if you hold your honour to any kind of worth.” Chaucer is rubbing the ball of his thumb, terribly, infuriatingly gently against the side of his prick, and Will can barely think. “How would you take your repayment?”

Will is biting his lip to keep himself from any word, noise, or other utterance he may later regret. But despite this he finds that he is about to speak. His eyes are on Chaucer’s, and he says, low, “Your mouth— ”

Chaucer says, “Yes, all right.”

He leans forward, lifting Will’s shirt out of the way, and Will lies back again, so that just as his head touches the floor, he feels Chaucer’s tongue touch his prick. He almost sits right up again, but instead he turns his head abruptly to one side— his neck wrenches, but it is not, for the moment, relevant— and splays his hands against the fur beneath them.

Will thinks, much later— after he has dreamed first of his nameless Aphrodite, been woken briefly by Wat and Roland expressly trying not to wake him as they return, and then dreamed, only a little shamefacedly, of this— that he does not actually know what he meant when he told Chaucer what he wanted. Its most obvious meaning was by no means unwelcome. And Chaucer had not lied: he did his work thoroughly and well, and for long enough that Will was made hot and open-mouthed with pleasure, trying to quieten the unbidden whine in the back of his throat.

And yet, as he blinks awake in the smallest hours of the night, Will wonders if he hadn’t wanted Chaucer’s mouth in some entirely different employment, pressed not to his flesh but to his ear. It is obvious, Chaucer’s gift with a crowd. The way he had whipped them into a frenzy in the sword-ring was astonishing. Will had never seen anyone do such a thing with nothing but the breath in their lungs. But what it might be like for the expanse of Chaucer’s voice to be made low and private, to deliver some strange mixture of beauty and profanity to him alone— he can’t quite imagine. Or perhaps he can.

After it is finished, and Will has shaken the last of the day from his body, he lies very still and breathes in. The smell of the night and the old furs and the bread in Wat’s baggage are more acute than usual. Chaucer has disappeared to spit his seed outside the tent.

“I meant,” says Will, his voice a little hoarse.

Chaucer has slipped back inside again, and Will looks up at him through cracked-open eyes as he says, “What?”

“I meant that you could pay me back out of your share of the prize.”

“After you’ve paid off our dear friend the summoner, your armourer, and split the rest by four? Hardly.”

“Maybe not all in one go. But out of your share of the next win, too, and the next.”

Chaucer’s mouth quirks upwards. He sits down, cross-legged, on the floor. “You really believe it, don’t you? That you’ll go on winning?”

“Yes.”

“And you think I’ll be coming with you.”

Will pushes himself up onto his elbows. He says, “ _You_ believe that I’ll go on winning.”

Chaucer looks at him evenly. “I do.”

“So, yes. I’m a good investment. A lucky streak.”

Chaucer half-laughs at this. He rubs at his brow, and says, “Yes.” Then, “Not only that. I think you’re— you’re a very good man, William.”

“Isn’t everyone trying to be?” says Will. He sits up properly. His joints feel looser.

“There you go, you see,” says Chaucer. He looks for a moment longer at Will, and then lifts his hand. Will thinks, for a moment, that he is going to put it against his cheek, that perhaps he is going to press his mouth to his lips, but in the end he only touches Will softly under the chin with a knuckle. Then he sighs, leans forward, and pats Will on the thigh, rather like one might pat a horse. “You should actually rest now.” He pushes himself to his feet.

“You’re leaving?”

“The night is still young, for those of us with far less of our lives left to waste. Yes, I’m leaving.”

Will is too thoroughly exhausted to argue. He lets his body collapse backwards once more, slack and ready for sleep.

He thinks that perhaps Chaucer will leave it at that, but then he hears him ask from somewhere above him, “So how much was that worth? Your ten florins?”

“More,” says Will, generously.

Chaucer laughs, a short, surprised sound. “William, your whores have been hideously over-charging you.”

“I have never paid a whore,” Will says. He doesn’t mean it to sound so prudish, but what with one thing and another, it is true enough.

“That is generally considered to be much worse.”

“I didn’t mean— ”

“I’m sorry. I know what you meant.” Chaucer is standing by the flap of the tent, his hands on his hips. Will cannot unpick his expression. “At the rate of a profoundly wealthy and ridiculously profligate knight,” he says, after a moment, “it might have been worth one florin.”

“Oh,” says Will. “Very well.” And then, “So— ”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Chaucer says, and he smiles, and then he is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/183226251957/ten-gold-florins-equestrianstatue-a-knights)!


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